Site Mobile Navigation

Sotomayor, a Trailblazer and a Dreamer

WASHINGTON — She was “a child with dreams,” as she once said, the little girl who learned at 8 that she had diabetes, who lost her father when she was 9, who devoured Nancy Drew books and spent Saturday nights playing bingo, marking the cards with chickpeas, in the squat red brick housing projects of the East Bronx.

She was the history major and Puerto Rican student activist at Princeton who spent her first year at that bastion of the Ivy League “too intimidated to ask questions.” She was the tough-minded New York City prosecutor, and later the corporate lawyer with the dazzling international clients. She was the federal judge who “saved baseball” by siding with the players’ union during a strike.

Now Sonia Sotomayor — a self-described “Nuyorican” whose mother, a nurse, and father, a factory worker, left Puerto Rico during World War II — is President Obama’s choice for the Supreme Court, with a chance to make history as only the third woman and first Hispanic to sit on the highest court in the land. Her up-by-the-bootstraps tale, an only-in-America story that in many ways mirrors Mr. Obama’s own, is one reason for her selection, and it is the animating characteristic of her approach to both life and the law.

“Personal experiences affect the facts that judges choose to see,” Judge Sotomayor (pronounced so-toe-my-OR) said in 2001, in a lecture titled “A Latina Judge’s Voice.” “My hope is that I will take the good from my experiences and extrapolate them further into areas with which I am unfamiliar. I simply do not know exactly what that difference will be in my judging. But I accept there will be some based on my gender and my Latina heritage.”

From her days going to the movies with cousins to see Cantinflas, a Mexican comedian whom she once called the “Abbott and Costello of my generation,” to her current life in the rarefied world of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, Judge Sotomayor, 54, has traveled what Mr. Obama called “an extraordinary journey.”

In her 2001 address, she spoke longingly of the “sound of merengue at all our family parties” and the Puerto Rican delicacies — patitas de cerdo con garbanzos (pigs’ feet with beans) and la lengua y orejas de cuchifrito (pigs’ tongue and ears) — that appealed to the “particularly adventurous taste buds” that she called “a very special part of my being Latina.”

Today, Judge Sotomayor’s culinary tastes range from tuna fish and cottage cheese for lunch with clerks in her chambers, to her standard order at the Blue Ribbon Bakery: smoked sturgeon on toast, with Dijon mustard, onions and capers. She works out three times a week, putting in three miles on the treadmill in the court’s gym. Divorced and with no children, she enjoys the ballet and theater and lives in a condominium in Greenwich Village — both a subway ride and a world away from the housing projects where she grew up.

Yet a few things have not changed: her feeling of herself as “not completely a part of the worlds I inhabit,” as she said in one speech; her drive and ambition; and her willingness to speak up about her own identity as a Latina and a woman. In many ways, she is walking through a door she pushed open herself. On the bench, Judge Sotomayor may be a careful deliberator, but off it she has been a tireless advocate for Latinos.

In 1976, she wrote her senior thesis at Princeton on Luis Muñoz Marín, the first democratically elected governor of Puerto Rico, and dedicated it in part “to the people of my island — for the rich history that is mine.” She has lectured at the University of Puerto Rico School of Law. In 2001, she was a speaker at a Princeton-sponsored conference titled “Puerto Ricans: Second-Class Citizens in ‘Our’ Democracy?’”

In describing his criteria for a Supreme Court pick, Mr. Obama said he was looking for empathy — a word that conservatives, who are already attacking Judge Sotomayor, have described as code for an activist judge with liberal views who will impose her own agenda on the law. Her critics also raise questions about her judicial temperament, saying she can be abrupt and impatient on the bench.

But Judge Sotomayor’s friends say she is simply someone who will bring the “common touch” that the president has said he prizes to her understanding of the law.

“I think she’s compassionate and empathetic, and I think she is going to really listen to people who are alleging that they have been victimized in some way,” said Robert H. Klonoff, dean of the Lewis & Clark Law School in Portland, Ore., who attended Yale Law with Judge Sotomayor and considers her a friend. Dean Klonoff, who last saw the judge in her New York chambers the day after Mr. Obama’s election, compares her to Thurgood Marshall, the Supreme Court’s first black justice, for the perspective he says she would bring to the court.

“She had such a different path,” he said. “There were so many people that had Roman numerals after their names and long histories of family members who had gone to Yale, and here was this woman who was from the projects, not hiding her views at all, just totally outspoken. She’s one of those where, even at a school with great people, I knew that she was going to go on and do amazing things.”

Childhood in the East Bronx

There was something of a pioneer spirit among the Puerto Ricans who settled into the East Bronx after braving tenements farther south or poverty back on the island. To settle into the Bronxdale Houses, as Sonia Sotomayor’s family ultimately did in the 1960s, was to find a haven of sorts, according to people who lived there then.

“Here was a paradise,” said Ricardo Velez, who was among the earliest tenants when he moved to his apartment in 1956. “It was beautiful.”

This was the place where Sonia’s parents, Celina and Juan Sotomayor, intended to raise their children — Ms. Sotomayor and her brother, Juan, who is now a doctor in Syracuse. The couple met and married during World War II after Celina was discharged from the Women’s Army Corps, the WACS, the outlet for women of her generation to give to the war effort. Celina Sotomayor had left Puerto Rico at 17 to sign up, shipping off to Georgia for her training with no relatives in the mainland United States.

While her husband worked at a tool-and-die factory, Celina Sotomayor — by all accounts the driving force in her daughter’s life — went on to become a telephone operator at Prospect Hospital, a small private hospital in the South Bronx, and later received her practical nurse’s license. The family’s life was upended when Sonia’s father died at 42, in part from heart complications that had kept him out of the Army. Celina Sotomayor, a widow with two young children and no savings, began working six days a week.

Her daughter retreated into books. Sonia Sotomayor loved the Nancy Drew mysteries, she once said, and yearned to be a police detective. But the doctor who had diagnosed her diabetes told her that she would not be able to do that kind of work. (The White House says Judge Sotomayor’s diabetes, a disease that can ultimately cause blindness, heart disease and kidney ailments, has been under control through insulin injections and careful monitoring for decades and does not affect her work.)

A ‘Perry Mason’ Moment

She also spent hours watching “Perry Mason” on television. An episode that ended with the camera fixed on the judge helped her set a new career goal, she told The Associated Press in 1998. “I realized that the judge was the most important player in the room,” she said at the time.

The Bronxdale Houses were still ethnically mixed when the Sotomayors lived there, and neighbors say it felt mostly safe. But Judge Sotomayor recalled in a 1998 interview with The A.P. that temptation was lurking nearby.

“There were working poor in the projects,” she said. “There were poor poor in the projects. There were sick poor in the projects. There were addicts and non-addicts and all sorts of people, every one of them with problems, and each group with a different response, different methods of survival, different reactions to the adversity they were facing. And you saw kids making choices.”

Parents made choices, too. For Celina Sotomayor, education was the highest priority; she bought her children an Encyclopaedia Britannica, a novelty in the projects. “She was famous for the encyclopedia,” said Milagros Baez O’Toole, a cousin.

Roman Catholic schools of that era were embraced by many working-class Puerto Rican parents who saw the public schools as too rowdy and dangerous. The Sotomayor family, which is Catholic, was among them. Judge Sotomayor attended Cardinal Spellman High School in the Northeast Bronx, which opened in 1959 and earned a reputation as a school for high achievers. She graduated as valedictorian in 1972.

Jeri Faulkner, who was a freshman when Judge Sotomayor was a senior, remembers black students sat at one table in the cafeteria, and Latino students at another. But Ms. Faulkner, who is now the school’s dean of students, said Ms. Sotomayor inspired her.

“As a freshman, when you’re looking at seniors, you’re a little awestruck with them,” Ms. Faulkner said. “She was smart. She always had time for you if you needed to speak to her. She didn’t belittle your questions. She wasn’t aloof. She was one of us.”

When Ms. Sotomayor entered Cardinal Spellman in the late 1960s, boys and girls were rigidly segregated into opposing wings of the school, with a nun stationed at a central point to enforce gender separation. But this “co-institutional” arrangement was abandoned while she was there, and the sexes mixed freely by the time she graduated. Ms. Sotomayor had a sweetheart, Kevin E. Noonan. “She was irrepressible, very popular, very bright, very dynamic,” said one classmate who asked not to be named. “She wasn’t overbearing about it, but you knew she was in the room.”

By then, the Sotomayor family had moved to a new apartment in Co-op City — a clear step up from the projects. The family’s Co-op City kitchen table became a regular gathering spot for food and conversation for Sonia’s classmates and debate team buddies.

“Sonia was very much the ruler of the kitchen-table debate,” said Kenneth K. Moy, the son of Chinese immigrants who was a year ahead of her at both Spellman and later Princeton. “She was very analytical, even back then. It was clear to people who knew her that if she wasn’t going to be a lawyer, she was going to be in public life somehow.”

Mr. Moy said Ms. Sotomayor’s crowd was a diverse mix of students that included immigrants from struggling families and others from well-to-do parts of Westchester County. They endlessly hashed over not only school gossip, but also Vietnam — where their friends were serving in a war that had divided the school — as well as the country, race relations and social justice, he said.

Sonia’s mother, Celina, would return home after long hours working as a nurse and feed the crowd of teenagers rice and beans and sometimes pork chops. “I can’t tell you how many times I said, ‘Is there another pork chop?’ — and there was,” said Mr. Moy, now a lawyer in Oakland, Calif. Later, he urged his friend to follow him to Princeton. But he was candid, he said, about what she would face there as a Puerto Rican from a modest background.

“I told her I don’t want you to come here with any illusions,” Mr. Moy recalled. “Social isolation is going to be a part of your experience, and you have to have the strength of character to get through intact.”

Adjusting to Princeton

When Ms. Sotomayor arrived at Princeton in the fall of 1972, she was one of the only Latinos there: there were no professors, no administrators, and only a double-digit number of students. Princeton women were sharply outnumbered as well; the first ones had been admitted only a few years earlier, and some alumni had protested their increasing ranks. (Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr., who graduated just a few months before Ms. Sotomayor arrived, belonged to one of the groups that protested.)

Ms. Sotomayor was terrified: she barely raised her hand in class initially, and years later, she confessed to a friend at Yale Law School that she could “barely write” when she arrived at Princeton. So she barricaded herself in the library, earning a reputation as a grind (her diligence would pay off with her eventual election to Phi Beta Kappa). She spent her summers inhaling children’s classics, grammar books and literature that many Princeton peers had already conquered at Choate or Exeter.

She also readily accepted help. When Ms. Sotomayor arrived in Nancy Weiss Malkiel’s history class in the spring of her freshman year, for example, she seemed unprepared, Ms. Malkiel recalled in an e-mail message. But Ms. Malkiel tutored her in how to read sources and write analytically, and by late in the semester, Ms. Sotomayor was flourishing.

By her junior year or so, “I don’t remember her being shy or reticent about much of anything,” said Jerry Cox, a classmate.

Ms. Sotomayor also became involved in campus politics. After heavy lobbying, she joined Acción Puertorriqueña, an organization working for more opportunity for Puerto Rican students.

“Sonia had to be persuaded to join us,” said Margarita Rosa, a friend from high school. “We were a ragtag-looking bunch, and she was always methodical in her decision making.”

Soon Ms. Sotomayor was co-chairwoman of the organization, which filed a formal letter of complaint with the Department of Health, Education and Welfare, accusing the university of discrimination in hiring and admission.

“The facts imply and reflect a total absence of regard, concern and respect for an entire people and their culture,” she wrote in an opinion article in The Daily Princetonian. “In effect, they represent an effort — a successful effort so far — to relegate an important cultural sector of the population to oblivion.”

In her student thesis, which she dedicated to nine friends and family members, Ms. Sotomayor wrote about Puerto Rico’s long struggle for political and economic self-determination. While Muñoz Marín created great hope among Puerto Ricans, “the island has continued to be plagued by unemployment, absentee ownership and dependency on mainland revenues,” she concluded. When Ms. Sotomayor graduated, she was awarded the Pyne Prize, the university’s highest undergraduate award, presented for a combination of strong grades and extracurricular work. Even before she won, everyone on campus seemed to know who she was. “I certainly admired her from afar,” said Randall Kennedy, now a professor at Harvard Law School and along with Ms. Sotomayor, a member of Princeton’s Board of Trustees.

Ms. Sotomayor went straight to Yale Law School, where she researched and wrote her way onto the law review by analyzing the arcane constitutional issues that would determine whether Puerto Rico would be allowed to maintain access to its seabed if it became a state.

Photo

A CHILD WITH DREAMS Sonia Sotomayor with her mother and father in a family photograph.Credit
The White House

Even when she described positions with which she disagreed, “she was scrupulous about giving the strongest form,” said Stephen L. Carter, who edited her submission and said Ms. Sotomayor was just as tolerant a debater in class.

Her submission was “inspired by deep social concern about having the poorest area in American jurisdiction survive economically,” said Edward Rubin, another editor. “It was very scholarly and balanced even though it was inspired by social concern.” Classmates remember just how hard she worked on it, polishing and repolishing it again.

At Princeton, Ms. Sotomayor had volunteered with Latino patients at a state psychiatric hospital in Trenton, and now she showed a similar desire to pull away from her elite environment. “She felt an affinity with the African-American janitor, the workers, people in the cafeteria,” recalled Rudolph Aragon, a classmate and who headed the Latin, Asian and Native American association with Ms. Sotomayor. “There were so few minority students that we had to combine forces,” he said.

An error has occurred. Please try again later.

You are already subscribed to this email.

Her closest friends at the school were all outsiders: Mr. Aragon, who is Mexican-American, along with three other students — a fellow Puerto Rican, a Mohawk Indian and an African-American, he recalled.

After hours they would retreat to one another’s apartments for baseball games — Ms. Sotomayor watched ecstatically as Reggie Jackson delivered the 1977 World Series to the Yankees — or to a local club where the law students danced alongside the locals. Ms. Sotomayor was still a grind, her friends said, but she also smoked, drank beer and danced a mean salsa.

She somehow seemed older than her classmates, several said — perhaps because of her difficult childhood, or maybe because she was already married. (She and Mr. Noonan, who would become a biologist and later a biotech patent lawyer, wed in the summer of 1976, but divorced seven years later.) And she knew exactly what she wanted after graduation: to be a litigator. She was “tough, clear, very quick on her feet,” said Martha Minow, now a Harvard Law School professor who advised the White House on the selection.

An Imposing Prosecutor

She would soon get plenty of practice. In 1979, Robert M. Morgenthau, the Manhattan district attorney, hired Ms. Sotomayor on the recommendation of José A. Cabranes, then a teacher at Yale Law School and now a federal appeals court judge. She became a young prosecutor in a city struggling with a drug- related crime wave, joining a trial unit that handled everything from misdemeanors to homicides.

“Some of the judges like to push around young assistants and get them to dispose of cases,” Mr. Morgenthau recalled. “Well, no one pushed around Sonia Sotomayor; she stood up to the judges, in an appropriate way.”

In her fifth year in the office, she was interviewed for The New York Times Magazine about the prosecutors working for Mr. Morgenthau. She was described as an imposing woman of 29 who smoked incessantly, and spoke of how she had coped in a job that some liberal friends disapproved of.

“I had more problems during my first year in the office with the low-grade crimes — the shoplifting, the prostitution, the minor assault cases,” she said. “In large measure, in those cases you were dealing with socioeconomic crimes, crimes that could be the product of the environment and of poverty.

“Once I started doing felonies, it became less hard. No matter how liberal I am, I’m still outraged by crimes of violence. Regardless of whether I can sympathize with the causes that lead these individuals to do these crimes, the effects are outrageous.”

In 1984, Ms. Sotomayor left the district attorney’s office and joined Pavia & Harcourt, a boutique commercial law firm in Manhattan.

“We had an opening for a litigator, and her résumé was perfect,” said George M. Pavia, the managing partner who hired her. “She’s an excellent lawyer, a careful preparer of cases, liberal, but not doctrinaire, not wild-eyed.”

A large part of Ms. Sotomayor’s work was fighting the counterfeiters who copied products of Fendi, the luxury goods company, and its well-known “double F” logo. Sometimes, that meant suing counterfeiters to stop them from importing fake Fendi goods.

At other times, it involved more derring-do: if the firm had a tip from the United States Customs Office about a suspicious shipment, Ms. Sotomayor would often be involved in the risky maneuver of going to the warehouse to have the merchandise seized. One incident that figures largely in firm lore was a seizure in Chinatown, where the counterfeiters ran away, and Ms. Sotomayor got on a motorcycle and gave chase.

In July 1987, Mario M. Cuomo, then the governor, appointed Ms. Sotomayor to the board of the State of New York Mortgage Agency, which helps low-income people get loans to buy homes. In 1992, when she left the unpaid board position, it passed a resolution honoring her for consistently defending the rights of the disadvantaged to secure affordable housing” and serving as the conscience of the board concerning “the negative effects of gentrification.”

A Docket of Notable Cases

In 1991, the first President George Bush nominated Ms. Sotomayor to be a federal district judge in the Southern District of New York. But she was informally selected by Senator Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Democrat of New York, who shared her working-class and parochial school roots and who was convinced, former aides said, that Ms. Sotomayor would become the first Hispanic Supreme Court justice.

Leaving private practice for public service meant that she would never be as wealthy as many of her peers. Financial disclosure forms that Ms. Sotomayor filed in 2007 show that her primary asset is her Greenwich Village condo, which she bought in 1998 with the help of two mortgages totaling $324,000 from Chase Manhattan Bank. Her last reported savings account balance was between $50,000 and $100,000, and she held no stocks or other significant investments. In addition to her judicial salary, she earned small sums for teaching at the law schools at New York University and Columbia University.

But her confirmation, in August 1992, made her the first Hispanic federal judge in the state. She joined a federal district courthouse in New York City whose docket is rich with everything from so-called drug mule cases to white-collar crimes and securities litigation.

She had several notable cases as a district judge on religious liberties. In 1993, she struck down as unconstitutional a White Plains law that prohibited the displaying of a menorah in a park. In 1994, she ordered New York prison officials to allow inmates to wear beads of the Santeria religion under their belts, even though prison officials said the beads were gang symbols.

Other notable cases included a 1995 ruling in which she ordered the government to make public a photocopy of a torn-up note found in the briefcase of a former White House counsel, Vincent Foster, who committed suicide. And in 1998, she ruled that homeless people working for the Grand Central Partnership, a business consortium, had to be paid the minimum wage.

But Judge Sotomayor’s most celebrated case came in 1995, when she ended a prolonged baseball strike by ruling forcefully against the baseball team owners and in favor of the ballplayers, resulting in a quick resumption of play. For a brief period, she was widely celebrated, at least in those cities with major-league teams, as the savior of baseball.

In 1997, President Bill Clinton nominated her to become a judge on the Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York. In filling out her Senate Judiciary Committee questionnaire, Judge Sotomayor seemed to evoke the same concerns for the real-world impact of rulings that Mr. Obama has said he is seeking.

“Judges must be extraordinarily sensitive to the impact of their decisions and function within, and respectful of, the Constitution,” she wrote. She arrived at her hearing with a New York construction contractor, Peter White, whom she introduced as “my fiancé” and who was photographed helping her on with her robe after she was sworn in as an appellate court judge. The relationship ended not long after that, roughly 10 years ago, according to a friend.

It took the Senate more than a year to confirm her. Republicans delayed a vote, drawing an accusation from Senator Patrick J. Leahy, a Vermont Democrat who is now the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman, that they feared that Mr. Clinton would try to elevate her to the Supreme Court.

But Alfonse M. D’Amato, then a Republican senator from New York, eventually helped push through a vote, and she was confirmed 67 to 29 in October 1998. Among those voting in her favor was Senator Orrin Hatch of Utah, who remains a leading Republican on the Senate Judiciary Committee.

Over the next decade, Judge Sotomayor would hear appeals in more than 3,000 cases, writing about 380 majority opinions. The Supreme Court reviewed five of those, reversing three and affirming two, although it rejected her reasoning while accepting the outcome in one of those it upheld.

A No-Nonsense Reputation

She would develop a reputation for asking tough questions at oral arguments and for being sometimes brusque and curt with lawyers who were not prepared to answer them.

The 2009 edition of the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which includes anonymous comments evaluating judges by lawyers who appear before them, presents a mixed portrait of Judge Sotomayor. Most of the unnamed lawyers interviewed said she had good legal ability and wrote good opinions. But several also spoke very negatively of her manner from the bench, saying she could be abusive of lawyers appearing before her and using words like “bully,” “nasty” and “a terror.”

But one former clerk defended her style.

“Personality- and style-wise, she is a dynamo,” said Lisa Zornberg, who clerked for her in 1997-98 and is now an assistant United States attorney in the Southern District of New York. Lawyers “who come before her know she always shows up on her game” and “doesn’t tolerate unpreparedness, nor should she.”

Judge Sotomayor has had several rulings that indicate a generally more liberal judicial philosophy than a majority of justices on the current Supreme Court, leading some conservatives to label her a “judicial activist.”

In 2000, for example, she wrote an opinion that would have allowed a man to sue a government contractor he accused of violating his constitutional rights. In 2007, she wrote an opinion interpreting an environmental law in a way that would favor more stringent protections, even if it cost power plant owners more money. The Supreme Court reversed both decisions.

The ruling by Judge Sotomayor that has attracted the most attention was a 2008 case upholding an affirmative action program at the New Haven Fire Department. A group of white firefighters sued because the city threw out the results of a test for promotions after few minority firefighters scored well on it. The Supreme Court is now reviewing that result.

Several of Judge Sotomayor’s appeals court clerks described her as a rigorous boss. Her clerks’ offices surround her own office and are within earshot, and she calls out to them when she has questions. She sometimes asks for the full records of trial transcripts and motions for a case that was on appeal, something her experience as a district judge has made her more interested in than some other judges.

Judge Sotomayor has also developed a reputation for treating her clerks as a family — taking a strong interest in their personal lives and careers, attending their weddings, keeping framed pictures of her former clerks and later, their children, in her office, and keeping in touch with them as a friend and mentor. She has told friends that one of her greatest regrets is that she herself was never a law clerk.

James R. Levine, a New York lawyer who clerked for Judge Sotomayor in 2001-2, recalled that during his interview with her as a law student, the first question she asked was about himself and his family, while every other judge with whom he interviewed had first asked about issues like the topic of his law review note. The interview would turn intellectually rigorous, he said, but first she wanted to get to know him as a person.

She has also tried to stay down to earth, friends say. Melissa Murray, who worked for the judge from 2003-4 and is now a law professor at the University of California, Berkeley, recalled going to a Yankees game with Judge Sotomayor. The judge, a Yankees fan, bought tickets in the bleachers, which Ms. Murray said the judge preferred as a more “authentic experience,” and she appeared to be known to several in the crowd.

“We were on the way to the bleachers and people were, like, ‘Judge! Judge!’ ” Ms. Murray recalled. “She is really well known in the South Bronx and kind of a role model in the community.”

Ms. Rosa, the friend who also went from a low-income childhood to Princeton and law school, said that the experiences that someone like Judge Sotomayor accumulated in her rise from the housing projects of the Bronx to the threshold of the Supreme Court would leave a vivid understanding of how the world works.

“We came up in a period of time with a sense of conscience about social justice,” Ms. Rosa said. “It grounded us in a set of values that told us our lives could be about something more than ourselves and the size of our bank account. That is a lesson many of us carry.”

In her 2001 speech, Judge Sotomayor reflected on how she applies that lesson.

“Each day on the bench I learn something new about the judicial process and about being a professional Latina woman in a world that sometimes looks at me with suspicion,” she said.

“I can and do aspire to be greater than the sum total of my experiences but I accept my limitations,” Judge Sotomayor added. “I willingly accept that we who judge must not deny the differences resulting from experience and heritage, but attempt, as the Supreme Court suggests, continuously to judge when those opinions, sympathies and prejudices are appropriate.”

Correction: May 29, 2009

A Woman in the News article on Wednesday about Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s nominee for the Supreme Court, misstated, in some editions, the year in which she was confirmed as the first Hispanic judge on the federal bench in New York State. It was 1992, not 2002. The article also misspelled, in some editions, the given name of the former Republican senator from New York State who helped push through the October 1998 vote in which Judge Sotomayor was confirmed as a member of the United States Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit, in New York. He is Alfonse M. D’Amato, not Alphonse.